“Ball of confusion, that’s what the world is today. Hey. Hey.”   - The Temptations.

The new health care package, the lady from eBay who wants to be governor, the gravity defying awesomeness that is Justin Bieber’s hair are all things I really do not understand. In fact, at the risk of sounding like Ed Anger or Andy Rooney, there’s a bunch of things I don’t understand.  So thank God for the more…

Foursquare recently announced that April 16th will be the world’s first social media holiday–Foursquare Day! The holiday will be celebrated in 100 cities around the world including Seoul, Sydney, Kuala Lumpur,  Manchester, Tampa, and Boston. Yay! And we should care because…?? Well, I’m not entirely sure that you should as I’m not totally certain if I do just yet either or even if I understand the point of more…

Once upon a time in a faraway land I like to call “The Early 1980s,” when a celebrity’s career had reached the end of the road, there were a few avenues open to them if they wished to remain in the spotlight. There were game shows like “$25,000 Pyramid,” or selling exercise equipment, or being a guest star on “Murder She Wrote.” Other than that, the prospects of hanging onto fame were slim to none.
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What with all of this Google, Apple and Twitter news this week it seems like it has been an eternity since we’ve heard a peep out of the bombastic yet reliable Facebook publicity machine. Well, fear not. I was able to dig up the latest in Facebook dirt in the suddenly neglected (yeah right!) social media superstar’s life.

For starters, this spiffy, little study showed that Facebook as well as Twitter both experienced a big bump last year in use on more…

The good folks over at the Pew Center’s Internet and American life project along with the Project for Excellence in Journalism conducted a survey to find out where and how Americans get their news. The results that were released yesterday and  splashed all over any website that would sit still (bravo, Pew, bravo!) won’t cause any of  us online junkies to fall out of our chair. As expected, TV is where most Americans still get their news with the Internet running a close second and more…

The current craze in online marketing is social media. That’s social media marketing. But how “social” should it be?

Social media marketing really is a new concept. Without the Internet it never would have seen its existence come to fruition. It really got its start because some savvy Internet marketers were playing around on social media sites like MySpace and Facebook and discovered that they could use the sites for business purposes.

But the sites are really not designed for that purpose. They are social sites.

Traditionally, marketing has been a push concept. A company would develop a product then push it out to market. The strategy was to go out and find people who might want or need their product and target them as customers. But in many cases, no one knew they wanted or needed the product until they had been sold on it. The marketers pushed it on them.

Social media marketing isn’t anything like that. It’s a pull medium. Marketers who engage their audiences through social media do so as social personalities, not as hawkers of some product that no one knows they want until they see a demonstration. With pull marketing, the idea is to develop a relationship with your audience before you try to sell them something. If you do it right then the people you develop that relationship with will seek you out and ask you about your products and services. Why? Because you pulled them toward you with your personality or magnetism.

Social media marketing is really more about the social than about the marketing. And successful marketers are doing it that way.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could harness the power of search technology, mix it with all the top social media outlets and access it when you’re away from your clunky laptop?  Well if you own an iPhone, your prayers have just been answered. Digital marketing powerhouse iCrossing just announced the release of a crazy cool iPhone app called “Say What?. According to iCrossing, “Say What?” is

“a free iPhone social media monitoring application that enables integrated search of Twitter, Digg, and thousands of forums and blogs. Say What? can be downloaded from the iTunes App Store.

This is the perfect solution for power users on the go who want real-time search data across multiple social media platforms right in the palm of their hands. According to a recent iCrossing press release, here’s how it works:

“Users enter a search term on a simple interface, and the latest conversations from each of the social media sites are returned in an easy-to-read format. Say What? displays the most recent conversations in aggregate, unlike searching social networks or blogs via a mobile browser.

Users have the option to dig deeper into the responses on a particular source, and a search history is saved so users can get easy updates for their regularly-searched terms.”

Between my Facebook, Twitter, WordPress and CNN apps, I may never have to take my face far away from the warm glow of my iPhone ever again.

How much should a pixel cost? Or better yet, how much should carefully arranged pixels that were once free cost? Well, more and more people are expecting their pixels to be free from the get go, that’s what attracted them to said pixels in the first place. Case in point, a new iPhone app for Twitter called Tweetie 2  was recently announced to be priced at $2.99 a pop.  You would think the twitter universe would be gleeful considering the rave reviews for Tweetie 2. Think again. When actress Alyssa Milano let her fans know her displeasure about the new cost of the once free app, she let the world know by tweeting out a big “Boooo”. This, in turn, created a lot of debate on the subject of giving you something for free, then charging you for it later. Another example of how pixel pricing is creating some buzz comes to us from the world of another social media giant.  A recent Business Week blog post titled, “Facebook users can afford to pay” , suggests that Facebook should cash in by charging users for services rather than trying to generate revenue via advertising. But if Facebook starts charging for stuff that people once got for free, wouldn’t that create an exodus to an alternative social media network, like Twitter, for example? As Twitter becomes more Facebook-like, that might not be such a bad idea. Just think, you would only have to manage one social networking platform at a time and you could let the other one collect dust on your browser. Maybe it’s not such a bad idea after all.

I came across an interesting article in today’s NY Times about a video product that could be the next big thing in very tiny, very short video content. The service is robo.to and comes to you via Particle, a San Francisco based think-tank that invents

“massively small, “featureful” products that humbly aim to impact people’s lives in a big way.”

Their latest offering aims to empower individual users to post very short (up to four seconds) videos onto their favorite social media platform, thus enabling tiny video tweets and updates to all your friends. Wanna tell your posse that you just ordered a venti cappuccino? Why not use your video enabled phone or webcam to record and share that foamy milk mustache you’ve got going on? And if you have multiple social media platforms (Twitter, Facebook, etc.), you can instantly broadcast that vid to all of them with just one click. As the company says on their site, “write once, publish everywhere”. But the service doesn’t stop there. Today, robo.tv is announcing the release of “TV Mode” which allows users to search videos based on a keyword or #hashtag. For example, if you type in #a in the searchbox in TV Mode, you will see all videos posted that start with #a. You can see how this could be a powerful tool once they get a few million video posts from around the globe.  This kind of short-form video content and distribution is a very simple, very elegant idea that could be used to get a visual snapshot of what is going on in the world of social media. It’s a pretty powerful little tool. One that I hope will catch on.